Gun That Was Found on Defendant Is Linked to Kahane Shooting

By M. A. FARBER

Published: December 5, 1991

Police ballistics experts yesterday linked both the killing of Rabbi Meir Kahane and the shooting minutes later of a Postal Service police officer to the silver-plated gun found with the accused assassin, El Sayyid A. Nosair.

It was the first testimony at Mr. Nosair's three-week-old trial to tie the .357-magnum Ruger revolver to bullet fragments recovered near Mr. Kahane's body at a midtown hotel and to pieces of bullets retrieved from a nearby post office where Mr. Nosair was wounded by the postal policeman.

The revolver was found at Mr. Nosair's side. But the 36-year-old defendant, an Egyptian-born Muslim, has denied that the gun was his. His lawyers say it was placed next to Mr. Nosair as part of a frame-up by Kahane followers who killed the Jewish Defense League founder after a long-running dispute, possibly over money.

Mr. Nosair has acknowledged attending the lecture that Rabbi Kahane, a former Israeli legislator who was fervently anti-Arab, gave at the Marriott East Side Hotel on the night of his death, Nov. 5, 1990. But when the rabbi was shot in the Morgan D meeting room just after the lecture, Mr. Nosair told the police, he fled for his safety. A block south of the hotel, at Lexington Avenue and 48th Street, he was fired upon by the postal policeman, Carlos Acosta. A Contradiction

Yesterday, a 25-year old mover from Queens contradicted much of Mr. Nosair's account.

The mover, Jonathan Dunetz, said that he and his father went to the lecture after seeing an advertisement in the Jewish Press. Mr. Dunetz said that, after a question-and-answer period, he went up to the podium to speak to Rabbi Kahane. Standing nearby, he said, was an "Arab-looking man" whom he identified yesterday as Mr. Nosair.

Mr. Kahane was busy talking to someone else, Mr. Dunetz testified, and, after a few minutes, Mr. Dunetz's father suggested they leave. The father also complained that the son's breath was foul, Mr. Dunetz said.

The witness said he was spraying a mouth freshener when he heard "loud explosions." He then dived under a table. There were two more explosions before he got up and saw Rabbi Kahane, who had been shot in the neck, lying in a pool of blood, his eyes dull. "Stop Murderer!"

As he ran from the room, Mr. Dunetz said, he saw an elderly man -- 73-year-old Irving Franklin -- bleeding near the rear door. In front of the hotel, he saw Mr. Nosair in a cab, holding a silver gun to the head of the driver. As Mr. Dunetz shouted "Stop murderer!" he saw Mr. Nosair leap from the cab, race a half a block south on Lexington and shoot "a man coming from the post office" -- Mr. Acosta.

In other testimony, Steven Hoffman, a computer sales representative from California who attended the Kahane lecture, identified Mr. Nosair as the man who, with a silver gun, shot Mr. Franklin in the leg in the rear of the meeting room.

Officer Henry Gomez of the Police Department's emergency squad said he removed pieces of a bullet from the wall behind Mr. Kahane's body and fragments of two bullets from a wall by the post office doorway. Detective Robert Cotter, who analyzed the fragments for the department's ballistics unit, said they could only have come from the revolver that lay next to Mr. Nosair.

William M. Kunstler, a lawyer for Mr. Nosair, suggested on cross-examination that Mr. Cotter's analysis could have been more comprehensive and that he should have taken photographs for the jury's benefit.